Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Troubling signs?

Kos this
morning brings us his perspective on a report in The American Prospect ("Fan
Friction") about grumblings within the Draft Clark movement about some
apparent heavy handed treatment by the official Clark campaign organization. I
am not going to say that this proves that the Clark campaign is in trouble. But
it does suggest a disturbing trend within the campaign that could destroy it
from within.

The Dean campaign has been run, almost of necessity, as a bottom-up campaign
from the beginning. Joe Trippi simply didn't have the resources to run a
national campaign by dictate out of his office in Burlington. It is to Joe's
credit that he has allowed a significant measure of control to leave his hands
and to let local organizations drive the Dean campaign as much as it has. It is
safe to say that Dean would not be where he is today without that approach. It
remains to be seen whether that approach will carry him across the finish line
next Fall.

The Clark campaign started out in a similar bottom-up approach. But now it is
trying to pull a trick even harder than that accomplished by the Dean campaign:
meld a top-down approach with a bottom-up approach. The question is whether the
more traditional campaign operatives that are signing on to the Clark team can
tolerate supporters in the field actually formulating strategies for how to win
and then doing it without first getting clearance from the central office.

This is not a question of whether Clark would be a good president or even a
good candidate. It is a question of whether his campaign can do right by their
man. I hope they can because, despite my being a Dean supporter, I want Clark to
run a strong campaign. You see, I know that Clark, on paper, matches up against
Bush better than Dean. But that's just the theory. If the practice lives up to
the theory then Clark will be the stronger candidate to throw up against
Bush next fall.

(Note: The Prospect article names several of its sources as prominent Draft
Clark people and Kos has a special perspective on this since he was part of that
early movement. Because of this, I don't think The
Pledge prohibits me from bringing attention to this story. If there really
is a growing problem within the Clark campaign it needs to be corrected now
before it really gets out of control.)

Update: I started re-reading the Prospect article and I found myself
quickly getting confused by the hodgepodge of names (both people and web sites).
So I decided to sit down and diagram the inter-relationships of all the people
and organizations listed in the article.

The diagram quickly grew out of control, but from it I think I can conclude a
few things: the evidence is strong that the Draft Clark movement did not
originate in the grassroots but was instead first developed by friends and
associates of Clark who listened to the General's musings about being drafted
"like Ike" and decided to make it a reality (whether Clark was
actually encouraging them to do this from the beginning or not is unknown).
However, as they started laying out the foundation for this pseudo-movement, the
real grassroots (i.e., Democratic activists not already associated with Clark)
began to take up the call and run with it. The result was that, by the time
Clark announced, there were two competing camps: the pseudo-grassroots movement
of Clark friends and the real grassroots movements of activists who were not
previously connected to the general.

The campaign's growing pains appear to be the natural difficulties that come
from trying to merge two groups that were never really on the same page in the
first place.

A closer analysis of the article suggests that much of the grumbling might be
coming from only a small group of the latter activists. However, prominent
amongst them is John Hlinko, the founder of DraftWesleyClark.com and the holder
of the largest list of email volunteers in the campaign. Hlinko has apparently
already worked out his differences with the campaign, according to the end of
the Prospect article, but it will be interesting to see if this unruly
hodgepodge can jell into a focused campaign.

I suspect this article might be making a bigger deal out of these
difficulties than is really there. Approach this story with caution as it might
be yet another example of the press trying to blow a story out of proportion.